“A child immediately rises up”

Things, the narrator tells us, “at the moment we notice them, turn within us into something immaterial, akin to all the preoccupations or sensations we have at that particular time, and mingle indissolubly with them.”

Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again, trans. Ian Patterson (London: Penguin, 2003).

An elementary-school kid takes my place when I read Alvin’s Secret Code; a middle-schooler, when I read Deathman, Do Not Follow Me.

See also this Proust passage.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

Vintage library supplies

From Smithsonian magazine: “Vintage Supplies that Kept Libraries Running.” I still see a couple of charging cases in my university library’s reference room. I think they hold scratch paper now. And I still see older books with the holes left by perforating stamps. They track the school’s changing names, from “normal school” to college to university.

One bit of more recent library technology I wish I had asked about as a kid: a machine in my branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. A book to be checked out was opened flat under a hood of sorts. A light flashed above, accompanied by a strangely satisfying thunk. At least I think that’s what happened. This machine must have been making photostats for circulation records. I remember that with several books, the librarian would nest them before checking them out.

(Is anyone familiar with what I’m trying to describe?)

Thanks to Gunther at Lexikaliker for passing on the link.

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May 2: I found two photographs of the charging machine I tried to describe.

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May 6: More discoveries in the post with the photos.

Related posts
The Card Catalog : Catalog card generator : Celebrity borrowers : Library slip, 1941, 1992

Back to the office

“To see March 2020 even though it’s 2021 kind of spooked me a little”: “A return to offices frozen in time” (The Washington Post).

Block that metaphor

Chuck Todd, speaking of Joe Biden on MSNBC not long ago:

“Here he is, now at the precipice of introducing a new era.”

Related reading
All OCA metaphor posts (Pinboard)

On Duke Ellington’s birthday

Duke Ellington was born on April 29, 1899.

Here are two recordings made not long before I began listening. They’re from “the stockpile,” the trove of recordings Ellington made at his own expense, unreleased in his lifetime.

From Black, Brown and Beige (1943), “Symphonette.”

Cootie Williams, Money Johnson, Eddie Preston, Richard Williams, trumpets; Booty Wood, Malcolm Taylor, Chuck Connors, trombones; Norris Turney, Buddy Pearson, Paul Gonsalves, Harold Ashby, Harry Carney, reeds; Joe Benjamin, bass; Rufus Jones, drums. Recorded May 6, 1971 and released on The Intimate Ellington (Pablo, 1977). The soloist is Harry Carney on baritone sax.

The UWIS Suite (1972), written for a week-long Ellington festival at the University of Wisconsin-Madison: “The Anticipation,” “Uwis,” “Klop,” and “Loco Madi.”

Duke Ellington, piano; Cootie Williams, Mercer Ellington, Money Johnson, Johnny Coles, trumpets; Booty Wood, Vince Prudente, Chuck Connors, trombones; Russell Procope, Harold Minerve, Norris Turney, Harold Ashby, Russ Andrews, Harry Carney, reeds; Joe Benjamin, bass; Rufus Jones, drums. On “Loco Madi,” Wulf Freedman, electric bass.

“The Anticipation,” for piano alone, was recorded on August 25, 1972 and released on Duke Ellington: An Intimate Piano Session (Storyville, 2017). The other sections were recorded on October 5, 1972 and released on The Ellington Suites (Pablo, 1976). The soloists on “Uwis”: Carney, baritone; Turney, alto; Procope, clarinet; Ashby: tenor. The closing bit: Turney, flute; Minerve, piccolo; Carney, bass clarinet; Ashby, tenor. On “Loco Madi”: Ashby, tenor; Johnson, trumpet; Turney, alto.

The Ellington band premiered The UWIS Suite on July 21, 1972 in Madison. To my knowledge, that was the single public performance.

Related reading
All OCA Ellington posts (Pinboard)

Theories

Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again, trans. Ian Patterson (London: Penguin, 2003).

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

ABC

On “the preeminence of ABC.” From Judith Flanders’s A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order (New York: Basic Books, 2020):

It is an unspoken assumption of alphabetic writing systems that the alphabet is primary. Letters near the beginning of the alphabet are somehow superior to those that follow: alpha males dominate romantic fiction; in the 1950s, B-movies followed or preceded the main feature; in the 1960s the B-side of records carried the songs that were not expected to be hits. The preeminence of ABC over, say, DEF, or LMN, runs unconsciously through every part of the world that uses an alphabet, and some regions that do not: there have been broadcasting companies named ABC in the USA, Australia, Britain, the Philippines, and even in Japan, a nonalphabet country; it is also the title of a Swedish news program, a Spanish newspaper, and several food companies and cinema chains across the globe. As well as an Arab Banking Corporation in alphabetic Bahrain, there is an Agricultural Bank of China in decidedly nonalphabetic China. ABC is a programming language, and a streaming algorithm. English-speakers learning first aid are reminded to check ABCs (airways, breathing, circulation). Mathematics has an abc conjecture, an ABC formula, and Approximate Bayesian Computation. The Admiralty, Baranof, and Chichagof Islands off the coast of Alaska are known as the ABC Islands; their counterparts in the Lesser Antilles are Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao.

I’m still in the preface and already learning things.

"Millionaire cousins“

A tribute to the housekeeper Françoise’s “millionaire cousins,” the Larivières, who come out of retirement to work in a café run by the widow of their nephew, who has been killed in the Great War.

Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again, trans. Ian Patterson (London: Penguin, 2003).

An odd moment, in which the relatives of a fictional character, in a book “in which everything has been made up,” are avowed as real. Even odder when we realize that it seems to be not “Marcel,” the autobiographical narrator, who speaks here but his creator, M. Proust.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

John Richards (1923–2021)

John Richards, the founder of The Apostrophe Protection Society, has died at the age of ninety-seven. Here is a tribute from the Society’s pages. And here is an article from The Washington Post.

Related reading
All OCA apostrophe posts (Pinboard)

The Netflix DVD library that was

Jim Vorel, writing about the Netflix DVD library that was:

We traded in a library of 100,000 titles for one that currently has less than 4,000 — and we’re never going to get the former back. There’s no telling how long even the gutted version of DVD.com (Netflix’s DVD spin-off) will continue to operate, but I imagine I’ll be going down with the ship, still nostalgic for its glory days.

Not me. Our household left Netflix some time ago. We rejoin for a month when there’s more Stranger Things.

Vorel’s commentary is worth reading, but I have to point out his publisher’s cynical trick of loading the URL with words chosen to generate traffic about DVD.com doom. The title of the commentary: “The Former Netflix DVD Library Is a Lost Treasure We’ll Never See Again.” But the URL that goes with it:

www.pastemagazine.com/movies/netflix/netflix-dvd-service-plan-subscribers-discontinued-closing

That’s why I haven’t linked. The URL is there if you want it.